Tag: Kanban WIP limit

You are ready to leverage Kanban in your project. At this moment you are convinced that Kanban works, it could be a good tool for your project and you understand when this is to be used. The big question is how to go about it. Let’s discuss that in simplest possible manner.

Visualize your work and existing resources – You need to understand answers to following questions. What kind of work or EPICs do you have? How long it to complete them? How many team members you have? What are their capabilities? Customer priority? Release cycle? What is the existing set of processes used at your BU or org level? How do you get work and what is the priority? The delivery expectations?

Setup Kanban Board – Once you have an answer to #1, you can set a Kanban board. For that, you need various stages, criteria (Definition of complete for that stage in order to be ready to move the item to next stage). You can have a white board and sticky notes to build your kanban board. You can leverage tools like Trello instead of leverage whiteboard/sticky notes. This may change over a period of time hence starting with Todo, In Progress and Done stages can be a good idea.

Define WIP limit – The WIP limit is assigned to each stage (Represents individual column). The WIP limit restricts team to add more items in the specific stage. This literally removes lots of waste. It does not allow you to focus only on one stage instead encourages continuous production.

Identify and Define Roles and Responsibilities – Kanban doesn’t prescribe specific roles but it is a good idea to have a product owner, scrum master and team member roles. Although in typically Kanban projects, the role of SM is very limited.

Start working – Start working on the model. Don’t be rigid on the number of stages, WIP limit, roles, and processes. This gets better over a time. Do not break the WIP limit rule. If you think the limit you set is not right, change it. This is most adaptive process hence most learning will be on the ground. The processes can be adjusted as you move forward.

Matrices/reports – You can have utilization, productivity, cycle time and other matrices. Do watch it closely as this would help you to stabilize the process per company need. The cumulative workflow diagram would be a really good choice to constantly monitor as it gives you very clear picture in terms of where the project stands.